I have been running a Synchronet BBS for about 20 years now and was thrilled when Rob Swindell decided to “Reboot” the BBS world and offer Synchronet to the open source community.

The below instructions are for installing the latest Synchronet (CVS) on Debian 9.x running as a non-root user for security reasons.

Since it’s release I have seen several guides on how to build Synchronet on various operating systems. I myself have built Synchronet in both FreeBSD and Linux (with limitations on the FreeBSD side, so I have always seemed to come back to the Linux platform). I have run my BBS (The Horizon BBS, http://bbs.horizonbbs.net) on CentOS, RedHat EL, Debian and Ubuntu and have found Debian to offer a good balance of stability, security and compatible packages when it comes to building and running synchronet.

I seem to keep my operating system pretty up to date, so I will be updating this guide from time to time to incorporate changes and workarounds in newer versions of Debian as it is released.

Building Synchronet on Debian 9.5:

Pre-requisites:

This tutorial assumes you are running Debian 9.5 Minimal (x64)

Install Dependencies:

The first thing that needs to be done is all dependencies need to be installed in order to create a sane build environment.

Update your system:

apt-get -y update; apt-get -y dist-upgrade

Install all software needed to build synchronet, in this example, we will be building synchronet with DosEMU support which will require you to modify your apt sources.list

nano /etc/apt/sources.list and add “contrib” to the end of the main debian stretch repository: